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Yes, I know for most of us, we all started back last Monday – but don’t try and tell me it was a productive week. You probably spent most of your time moaning and trying to work out how you could retire but still have enough cash to buy food, booze and gadgets.

Anyway, to celebrate this horrendous occasion, I thought I’d start off with a product that has – quite frankly – one of the most ridiculous product differentiators I’ve ever seen.

Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls … I give you this moment of product development mentalness from Philips:

Look at that headline, ‘THEY LOOK LIKE JEANS’.

No they don’t, they look like headphones.

Bad headphones.

And besides, who the hell would even want some that look like jeans.

Scrap that, who the hell would even want some that have denim on them?

What the hell were Philips thinking????

Actually, that’s probably the problem … they’re not thinking, because if they were, they’d know this sort of thing was utterly ridiculous – even more ridiculous than that grenade bluetooth speaker? I wrote about last year.

Everything about this product smacks of a company just going through the motions.

There’s no reason for them, no benefit to them … they’re just adding to the noise – and I would bet the reason for this is because the headphone division of Philips had a KPI to launch 3 new products this season and this is ensuring they don’t get told off in their annual review.

They wouldn’t be the first organisation to ‘output for self interest’ reasons, but it still doesn’t make it any better.

When you look at the success of BEATS and countless others, you can see there are ways to make an impact on almost any market, however shoving a piece of denim on a pair of headphones and running an ad that say’s, ‘They Look Like Denim, They Sound Like Awesome Headphones’ is not one of them.

My heart goes out to the creative team that had to put this together. I’m fairly certain it will never, ever, ever feature in their portfolio, just like I doubt those headphones will never, ever, ever feature on a pair of ears that are owned by someone over the age of 7.

And that ad has the nerve to use a tag line that says, “You Need To Hear This”.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Seriously, the last thing anyone wants to do is draw attention to either that product or that ad.

An ad, I hasten to add, that has a background image that is one of the best bits of terrible cliche I’ve seen in a long, long time.

So to the lovely folks at Philips … you used to say you were about sense and simplicity, well it seems you’re only 50% of that statement these days, so may I suggest you get your act together before you end up looking like Nokia.

I’ll ignore those headphones because they haven’t got a single redeeming feature about them. But the problem with beats is that they their loudness comes from how they look, not how they sound and they sound shit.

I feel sorry for Philips. They make all manner of good quality, reliable and well bought out products but undermine themselves by communicating beige blandness or cliched cool that turn people off in equal measure. They feel like an organization struggling to define who they are even though from a product perspective, they appear fairly consistent. Jean headphones aside.

And the problem is, when they do come out with something great – their Hue lights for example – too many people will ignore it because the company doesn’t command an image that makes you think they push boundaries, but that they simply make simple things and do them well. There’s nothing wrong with that – and they embraced it with their ‘sense and simplicity’ positioning a while back, but I genuinely believe they are much better than that and they need to stop being bland and have a real point of view that people re-frame the brand in their mind. But then I would say that wouldn’t I.

what the fuck can you do for beats? i bet thats the best fucking news every competitor has heard in years. i know hip replacement pensioners who are hipper than you and i bet all the shit 80/90s pop stars you played with are wetting their panties thinking youre going to bring them back for a dre produced album. poor fuckers, still havent realised theyre n the “where are they now” bucket because of you. the worlds gone mad. fucking mad.

On behalf of former Philips Team members including working on in-ear headphones that were supposed to be like jewelry. ..they have so missed the plot for so long I don’t know if it’s them or their agency…